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Wednesday, July 19, 2017

If, like me, you are a Blackberry 10.x user, you have probably been using FastTube for years not... not not and gave up like me... and then a couple of nights ago, was forced to stop using Whatsapp.
That annoying "switch to a supported device please" message that makes you furious to the core.

I've always been an android user... I have 3 android phones, 4 android tablets... and I must say I can live with android (normally after removing the operator and manufacturer bloat-ware)... but my side kick? my pocket secretary? that's the blackberry. It's always been, and I really hate that the community "try and force me out of something without first building something better for me to move to".

It's an easy (economics like) step to say "whatsapp is free, you need to use the devices we tell you to use"... but there is a reason why brilliant people are taught engineering at college instead of economics.

I hate those "non engineering, all economics, brainless decisions" and I also love a good challenge. So I took 5 minutes to digg deeper into this.

So sure the BB whatsapp is no longer supported... uninstall that crap, it will never work again.
However, the brilliance of BB system 10.x is that is has embedded android libraries as standard. That is why you can download .apk files and run it.
The problem is that most of those libraries are accessed by the GUI and the GUI from BB was built to use it's own functions.

Solution? Well why not installing a GUI manager for Android. Grab the "Nova launcher" APK and install it. All you need is to have BB OS 10.2 up... I'm using 10.3. The other APK you really need is the Playstore apk. Even if it does not run, some APK's check for it at launch so "being there" is important.

One of the apks that you can install is the Watsapp apk... and believe-me... it runs perfectly.

No need to buy a new phone... just to digg into the BB OS10 project and be amazed with the similarities between the 2 xNIX platforms and their respective support framework.